


one more night

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Origin Story, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21527098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Before everything, you remember the shape of your glasses on your face and the taste of Flash Thompson’s ugly words in your mouth.
Kudos: 2





	one more night

**Author's Note:**

> This is a repost with some edits. Thanks for reading.

Before everything, you remember the shape of your glasses on your face and the taste of Flash Thompson’s ugly words in your mouth. You know Ned’s voice and his mind, like a lockpick unraveling the most tangled of knots - the same mind that cooks up schemes like scratching Flash Thompson’s gorgeous electric blue bike on the middle school curb. You dream in that color, sometimes - that and dried blood scarlet. Now you are a boundless brain thrown into a fourteen year old’s body, strength that you hold taut against you, because leaving it be means people getting hurt. The chasm of unremembered loss (your parents) and pain so vivid it breaks a million wounds open (Ben) will never be a scar or a scab - it will stay open and gaping and a reminder of who you are. 

You sit at your desk on September 11 every year. You watch documentaries with the symphonies made of people’s screams and the emotions that no one in your class can dare to formulate. The September before you're bitten by that spider, you come back to Aunt May sitting at the kitchen table - eyes clouded, hair in a tangled knot, cupping tea but not drinking it. You are a child of curiosity- you want to ask but you don't. She tells you anyway, says something about your parents and _too late_ \- and you can't recall a scrap at all, not how they smell, the shape of their voices, how they smiled at you when you first toddle along in their arms. May will tell you and inexplicably you will find something that is grief’s pale twin. 

You find the other side. You know the other twin when you have dreamt in scarlet red and your knees are painted with it and asphalt gray and the insides of your uncle's heart. Your voice has torn itself to pieces - your body is not your own - you see, for the first time. Someone will say you were screaming - May will whisper a language of round words and slick syllables as you sit in the morgue. It’s a bit like quantum mechanics, Schrodinger's cat, a small part of your mind will say - alive but dead - Ben’s body is in the next room over, but all the life has evaporated away. You think about branching timelines, accelerating farther and farther away from one another until they are no longer joined at the hip - the juncture of one single decisions. You think about what you will do - here in this morgue, trying to hold it all in. You make a promise you don't know if you can keep - but you look at May’s face and tell yourself you will do your best.

Pain sits in your gut for months; you will not be able to swallow. You will fall, fall, fall before you kiss the sidewalk, stopping before you are nothing more than a broken tangle of limbs. 

You think for a moment, legs hanging off a roof, sticky sandwich in hand, about your bones stitching themselves anew, faster than even you know. 

You wear red and blue and think of Flash Thompson’s bike and Ben’s blood and think of colliding with the ground below you, or missing it by an inch. 

You stand on the tips of your toes and look above. Webbing holds you aloft in the air - for a single moment, you are in some kind of formless dance. You land with your feet on the ground - balanced, perfect. Many, many years later, you will realize this is the last day before it became real. The day after this, you will make excuses to a man with a literal suit of armor - excuses about homework that doesn't exist. 

You are young, but not. You sneak into labs during free periods and revel in Legos clicking together and think about girls and boys. You also hold strength that carries buses and buildings and lives - you hide in the shadows of police sirens and hope to hell they don't see you. The media brands you what they want - you stare at yourself when you see the videos and read the articles because you are fourteen and brilliant but fourteen and stupid. 

In this moment, when you stand on the sidewalk and watch the slow drag of New York around you, you smile. You think about flying, if only for a heartbeat. 


End file.
